The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound bond and responsibility of parenthood, suggesting that true understanding comes only through the experience of being a parent.
Philip Roth's quote highlights the wisdom that is bestowed upon a parent through personal experience rather than mere belief. It suggests that the journey of parenthood is a transformative one, where the challenges and joys of raising a child bring about a deeper understanding of life's complexities. The phrase 'someday you'll be a parent' conveys anticipation for an inevitable life stage that will evoke empathy and insight that cannot be taught but must be lived.
In practice
A speaker at a parenting workshop might use this quote to encourage understanding between parents and their children.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
Dads are not a risk to be managed, but a resource to be used for the benefit of the whole family.
There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe.
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.
Everything, I just wanted to be like my father. And, as I grew within the music, I kind of became myself which was even more like my father, only without me trying though.
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.
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